In this first course of the specialization Excel Skills for Business, you will learn the essentials of Microsoft Excel. Within six weeks, you will be able to expertly navigate the Excel user interface, perform basic calculations with formulas and functions, professionally format spreadsheets, and create visualizations of data through charts and graphs.
Whether you are self-taught and want to fill in the gaps for better efficiency and productivity, or whether you have never used Excel before, this course will set you up with a solid foundation to become a confident user and develop more advanced skills in later courses.
We have brought together a great teaching team that will be with you every step of the way. A broad range of practice quizzes and challenges will provide great opportunities to build up your skillset. Work through each new challenge with our team and in no time you will surprise yourself with how far you have come.
Spreadsheet software is one of the most ubiquitous pieces of software used in workplaces across the world. Learning to confidently operate this software means adding a highly valuable asset to your employability portfolio. At a time when digital skills jobs are growing much faster than non-digital jobs, make sure to position yourself ahead of the rest by adding Excel skills to your employment portfolio.

レビュー

MG

A great course for beginners in MS Excel. Introduces one to the various functionalities that Excel has to offer. Course content and structure are excellent and helps one to learn at an optimal rate.

DD

Apr 26, 2020

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

great course, great instructions, very clear and helpful. I am not a beginner but it is still very useful as you picked up some of the details that you would not have known just by doing self-taught

レッスンから

Performing calculations

The syntax of formulas is very important in Excel. In this module, you will get introduced to formulas and functions - learn how to write them, use them to perform calculations and understand the different cell references.

講師

A/Professor Yvonne Breyer

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Welcome to week 2. Sean's task for this week is that his manager has given him some calculations to do an Excel. Nicky, do you think that will end up scaring Sean? Probably no. The whole point of starting with the calculations is to put Sean's fears behind him. There's nothing to be scared of. We're going to start very slowly nice small steps, building up getting quite comfortable with how calculations work. The other thing is, I want our learners to get as much practice as possible because really anything that comes easy, if you've had enough practice. Yeah. Also while some people might be thinking, "Oh, calculations. I don't need those.". Really to be a competent Excel user, you have to know the basics. Once you've mastered those basics, once you've got the critical call of how it actually works, the rest becomes easy. You can build on that knowledge and start doing some of the more complicated things if your job demands it. For our learners, how will we break it down this week? Good questions. So, what we're going to do is we're going to start with a very basic video on working with formulas. The idea is to just to get used to the language of Excel. So, simple numbers, simple calculations. Once we're good with that, we're going to move on to the next step which is applying those skills to real business problems. So, slightly more complicated but not difficult. Then once everybody is feeling good about formulas, we're going to start looking at functions, and we're going to start with the sum function. Okay. You mentioned two things, formulas and functions. They sound the same to me. Yeah, absolutely. I am the worst for getting those terms interchanged. But actually, there is a little bit of a difference. So, a formula is a calculation. It always starts with an equal sign. When we want to use really simple calculations in Excel, it's much like we would do on a calculator. You can just say this times that, or this subtract that. The problem is when you want to start working with very complex calculations or thousands of numbers to sit there typing it all in, isn't feasible. So instead, Excel has given us an option to use something called a function. A function is like a little miniature program that does the work for you. So, it actually makes life easier. So, whenever we want Excel to perform a calculation for us, we need to use the equal sign. A basic formula would be like adding four cells, equals B4 plus C4 plus D4 plus E4. That's a simple calculation. But if we wanted to add up 400 cells, that's going to be quite inefficient. So, Excel has functions that it will help us. An equal sign followed by a few captal letters, such as SUM for the sum function, open brackets followed by a cell reference. In this case, the cell reference would be B4:E4 and then we close the brackets. The colon tells Excel that this is a range of data all the way from B4 to E4. Absolutely spot on. You've described it perfectly. Okay. But the problem is, there are about 500 of those, Nicky. What are we going to do next? Well, we're not going to do all of them. But we are going to look at three of the ones that are most useful. Once you start working with three or four, the rest all become a lot easier because they all follow a very similar pattern. Okay. Does that include that dollar thingy that we have to put in sometimes when we have specific functions and formulas? Dollar thingy, a good technical term. What you mean is absolute cell references. Absolutely, we do definitely need to look at that. But that's getting a little bit trickier. So, I think what we should do is given alone as a chance to work through videos one through four, and then we'll come back and explain the dollar thingy in a bit more detail. So, you've heard it now. Nicky suggests there are four practice videos for you to work through. Make sure you download the Excel files, and you're going to work alongside Nicky with those four practice videos. Then you're going to practice them by yourself as well. Then we'll come back to you and break down the dollar thingy, absolute cell referencing for you. So, we'll get back to you soon. But now, it's over to you to practice.